200 Pounds White, 1778 issue

Bank of England "white notes" of this period were handwritten instruments, not printed ones in any modern sense — the body text was engraved and press-transferred, but the payee name, date, cashier's signature, and serial number were all added by hand at the point of issue. A cashier's clerk filled in each note individually, which means no two examples from this run are identical in the way a printed note would be.

The £200 denomination placed this firmly in the world of merchant banking and large commercial settlements. Retail trade never saw notes of this size. The 1797 suspension of cash payments — when the Bank stopped redeeming notes in specie due to wartime financial pressure — affected the entire white note series, and circulation patterns shifted accordingly during the long Restriction Period that followed.

Forgery of these notes was a capital offence, and executions for uttering forged Bank of England paper continued into the 1820s.